For some years now, my son and I have been having the same fragment of conversation. Not the one about why he always leaves his disgusting socks adrift on the floor like dead jellyfish instead of putting them in the laundry basket where they belong, but the other one, about my advancing senility. When I find myself, as I do with terrifying frequency, unable to think of a word I need, or standing in his bedroom, holding a saucepan and a Latin dictionary, with no idea why I have arrived there thus equipped, I tend to whimper: “Please don’t put me in a home, Alexander. Not a nasty home where they’ll give me other people’s false teeth and call me by my first name and put my dinner where I can’t reach it . . .”
“No, no, Mother, don’t worry,” says the child, bang on cue. Or, if I haven’t been especially nice to him: “It depends on your behaviour, doesn’t it, Mother?” And we laugh and I go back downstairs with my dictionary and saucepan and halfway down the stairs, I remember what it was that I wanted to say to him in the first place.
The other day he varied the script and instead of laughing, looked worried and said he didn’t want anything to happen to me. No chance of that, said I. I mean to be a burden to you for years to come. Still, a small chill struck us both, and it struck a bit chiller when, earlier this month, I had to visit the doctor twice, once for something that turned out to be a cataract (At my age! I said, horrified), and again for a joint problem.
Do your mother’s hands look like that? asked the doctor, peering interestedly at my bony witch’s fingers with their swollen coldwater knuckles. No, but my grandmother’s did. I remember them well, little gnarled claws clutching the sheets as she lay on her deathbed, and I am suddenly gripped by a clear implacable vision of these small degenerations as signposts on the road down which I am travelling towards my own deathbed. My grandmother, as it happens, had a good death. She died in her own bed, at a great age, suffering neither intolerable physical pain nor mental confusion, surrounded by her family. It was the sort of death that most of us would choose if we could. Since then, though, I have found myself the spectator of other deaths, more lonely and less fortunate. The sorts of death that no one would choose.
The crucial word here is “choose”. The word “choice” is one particularly favoured by our Government. We have, or are supposed to have, “choice”, in education, in healthcare, in every area of life — except in the matter of our final moments, in which we have no choice at all, but must resign ourselves, like so many Patient Griseldas, to whatever indignities nature, assisted by social and medical care workers, may choose to heap upon us.
And when someone takes it upon herself to make a choice about the manner of her own death, as the retired physician Anne Turner courageously did this week, plenty of otherwise sensible people, people who wouldn’t dream of relinquishing control of, say, their pension provision or their children’s education, suddenly commence to flap and squawk like so many hens frightened by the sight of a fox.
The argument against assisted suicide invariably trotted out on these occasions by assorted churchmen and figures such as Dr Anthony Cole, the chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, is that “all lives, including those of the disabled and dying, are of intrinsic value”. This is a wonderfully comfortable nostrum when you are a sleek and prosperous bishop or physician in excellent physical and mental health. I imagine it seems a good deal less persuasive to someone in intolerable physical pain or facing, as Dr Turner was, a protracted and inexorable decline of the kind through which she had already nursed her late husband.
Where, in any case, is the contradiction between valuing life and choosing to end it once it has become intolerable? My own genetic inheritance means that there is a fair chance that my brain and body will carry on working rather longer than my desire to continue inhabiting them. If that moment should arrive, then I want to be able, if I choose, to take charge of the situation — not distressingly, with a visit to an unknown doctor in a clinic in a foreign country, and not untidily, with ugly amateurish experiments involving over-the-counter drugs and plastic bags, but calmly and with grace, in the same way that I have tried to make the other important decisions of my life.
Angelina gets her Kit on
All this thinking about death leads me inexorably on to the subject of regrets, of which, needless to say, I’ve had a few. I wish I’d learnt to dance properly, I wish I’d had several more sons and, after reading yesterday’s papers, I wish I had a Beautiful Thought in Latin tattooed across my tummy, just like Angelina Jolie. “Quod me nutrit me destruit,” reads the inscription in Gothic script, right across the gap between her cropped top and low-slung maternity trousers. The sentiment is apparently nicked from a recently discovered portrait of the playwright Christopher Marlowe. Now Angelina is pregnant with twins, and a small, sensible part of me is wondering what Kit Marlowe’s inscription is going to look like once she’s had them. A bit withered, I should think, to put it mildly. But another part, the part that reveres Angelina almost as much as it reveres Marlowe, is wondering wildly not whether it’s too late to have a Latin tattoo, but which particular bit of Latin I should choose.
Bell epoque
What is it with the sudden flurry of enthusiasm for Radio 4’s UK Theme? All sorts of weighty figures have rallied behind it, from Jeremy Paxman and my colleague Michael Gove to David Blunkett and the Chancellor himself, who claimed yesterday that “I’ve always seen the UK Theme as one of the symbols of Britishness”. Can he mean the same UK Theme that makes me spring from my bed each morning in a frenzy of irritation? The insipid medley of folk tunes whose only distinction is as a period piece, long past its sell-by date? I agree with the pro-Themistas that one needs some small buffer between unconsciousness and the day’s grim news. So if the Chancellor wants a symbol of Britishness, what about the ancient, wild pealing of church bells? Or if that’s not multidenominational enough, let Radio 4 begin the day with the pure, perfect and irreproachably British sound of the dawn chorus.
